| I think a lot of developer tools come with exactly the type of statement the author is looking for--"what the developers were thinking when they designed it...the assumptions that were made about how the program should be used." I too would also enjoy it if people started doing this for ordinary software as well. But I think I know a reason why they don't. The author raises the example of Microsoft Word, so let's imagine we were going to write such a statement for Word. The problem is that we'd end up writing something that would piss people off. The author says this: "Why is it so much work to change the fonts in a paper written in Word? Because you shouldn't be setting fonts directly; you should be using paragraph styles to signify your intent and then make visual adjustments later." But when I look at word's interface, it doesn't look like word was designed with that philosophy in mind at all. He's right that using styles instead of setting fonts directly will make it easier on you later, but that clearly wasn't Word's philosophy. If you want to directly change the font or style of just the one piece of text you selected, there are multiple toolbar and menu widgets, highly visible and available, as well as multiple shortcut keys. In office 2007 they added the "live preview" feature to make it really smooth while you're doing it. They clearly went out of their way to make these types of direct changes really easy and really discoverable. On the other hand, if you want to define a new style, or change one of the styles that is already defined, you have to do through multiple layers of nested modal dialog boxes. Once you have done this, using the style is made easy and highly available (lots of ribbon space, etc.) But again, the easy action is a purely local action--it operates on only on the text selected. So to me it looks like word's philosophy is: you should be able to visibly see ALL the results of what you're doing right as you do it. Anything that violates this rule gets set aside in a dialog box so that the ordinary folks won't hurt themselves with it. That can make things really frustrating when you're editing a large document and want to keep things consistent across it, but they'd rather make their tool easy to understand upfront, even at the expense of larger scale advanced use. Other tools that are intended for mostly professional use, such as Photoshop, make the opposite choice--they allow their interface to be less obvious at first in order to make it easier to use at an advanced level. The kind of philosophy statement the author is looking for would end up making that type of tradeoff pretty obvious, even if it managed to avoid stating it explicitly. And most people won't want to do that when they're thinking from a marketing perspective. They never want anything that states, or even too strongly implies, that their tool has a drawback--even if it's one that was accepted on purpose to get a better benefit elsewhere. I'm not arguing that this is (or isn't) the right way to approach marketing--but I can say it's easy to observe this mindset across many different fields, including our own. |
I myself would never consider Word for anything over about 2 pages, but I'm guessing I'm in the minority on that.